


there's an ache in you (put there by the ache in me)

by star_sky_earth



Series: sleep [8]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Pseudo-Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 19:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29265636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/star_sky_earth/pseuds/star_sky_earth
Summary: Clarke kicks off her heels in the hallway, two neat thuds as they hit the baseboard, and looks up at Bellamy with miserable blue eyes. She’s even smaller in bare feet, the top of her head just reaching the middle of his chest, and it’s the work of an instant to see her as a child again, to blink and remember the tiny four year-old he first met all those years ago, clutching tight to his sister’s hand like a lifeline.“My mom’s gonna be mad at me,” she says, wretched. Her lower lip quivers, soft and pouting, and he thinks about kissing her, tendering that petal-pink flesh between his teeth until it’s swollen and blushing red. “I didn’t tell her that I was leaving the party. She’ll be worried.”A Christmas story, set in the sleep series verse.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, Some Bellamy/Gina
Series: sleep [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1261004
Comments: 11
Kudos: 70





	there's an ache in you (put there by the ache in me)

**Author's Note:**

> Ooof...so I started this on Christmas Eve and I really have no excuse why it took me so long to finish! But I hope you all enjoy it anyway!
> 
> This story is set about six months (give or take) before the first sleep series story. Bellamy and Clarke are not together, and Octavia hasn't done anything with Bellamy yet either.

“Bellamy,” Gina gasps, arching up against him on the bed. Her hands tighten in his hair where he’s slowly kissing his way down the side of her neck, and he feels the frantic flutter of her pulse against his mouth. “Oh _fuck_ , Bellamy.”

He hums in response as he carefully scrapes his teeth against that spot on her throat - _that spot_ , the one that makes her go wild, where all the nerves run close to the surface like a live wire connected right to her cunt - and she bucks, tightening her thighs around his hips, rubbing herself against him like an alley cat in heat. He glances up to see her head tipped back against the pillow, the long graceful line of her neck and sweetly pointed chin, the messy spill of her auburn curls against the white bedding. 

It’s Christmas Eve, and the dark night stretches long and uninterrupted before them, the house long since settled into peaceful silence. Octavia went to bed a couple of hours ago, after an excruciating ‘family dinner’ during which Bellamy pretended not to notice the dagger looks passing between his sister and his girlfriend, the entirely too threatening way that O brandished her chopsticks whenever Gina turned her back. It might have been easier if Clarke were there, the living embodiment of oil on troubled waters, but it had just been the three of them tonight, his princess spending a rare night at her mom’s for the Annual Griffin Christmas Eve Party. 

But Bellamy is…not thinking about that. Hasn’t been thinking about it all night, in fact. Hadn’t caught his eyes drifting to her empty chair all through the meal, his shoulders so tense that Gina had remarked on it, sympathetically tutting as she massaged his neck. Hadn’t checked his phone every ten minutes, making sure it wasn’t on silent, his car keys on the coffee table where he could see them, could grab them at a moment’s notice. Hadn’t refused a second beer after dinner, just in case he had to drive. 

_“Who ordered the sesame chicken?” Gina had asked while he was unpacking the food, wrapping her arms around his waist from behind, her chin on his shoulder. “I don’t remember that on the list.”_

_“Uh…” he’d replied, staring at the little white carton, feeling his brain stutter to a halt. He didn’t remember ordering it, honestly, his body operating on auto-pilot, some fucked up kind of muscle memory. “I think…”_

_“That’s Clarke’s order,” Octavia had interrupted, Bellamy cursing her silently as Gina’s arms went lax around him. “That’s what she always gets, right Bell?”_

The impatient tug of Gina’s hands in his hair drags his thoughts back to the woman beneath him, and he resumes his progress kissing down her throat, taking advantage of her distraction to sneak his hands up under her thick woollen jumper. She shakes, caught off guard by the dual assault, and the muscles in her flat stomach tremble as he runs his fingers over them, tripping up the ladder of her ribcage. He pauses when he feels lace against his fingertips, running a curious finger along the line of her bra, where silk skin meets fabric. 

He pulls away from her neck to look at her, his mouth curving into a lazy smile. “Is this my Christmas present?”

Gina grins and shrugs as best as she can lying down, her hazel eyes sparkling. Fuck, but she’s cute. “If you’re a good boy, I’ll let you open it early.”

He raises his eyebrows, and then deliberately thrusts against her, letting her feel just how hard he is, watching her eyes flutter closed as her mouth opens on a whine. “You sure you want a good boy?”

Bellamy is not a good boy, not by any means, but he knows that he’s good at this. Maybe it’s a natural gift, an inborn talent. As much a part of him as the breadth of his shoulders, the narrow lines of his hips, the precise sharp angle of his jaw, drawn just so and no other way. Written into his DNA, all those random chains of unintelligble letters translated into the breathless language of desire; mysterious alchemy, like shimmering gold patiently coaxed from lead. There must be something that draws women to him, he thinks, beyond the tired cliché of the charming bartender. Something that they see, in the shadows of his dark eyes or the sure movements of his steady hands, the promise of pleasure to come, the welcoming black of oblivion. Or maybe it is just that he loves this. Loves the delicate art of taking someone apart with his bare hands, reducing them to groans and gasps and brute desperation, the kind of undoing that goes beyond mere violence. His body is a finely honed tool, or perhaps a weapon, and like all craftsmen he cannot help but derive pleasure from its use. 

Bellamy could love Gina too. He could. Already he can feel the first tentative whispers of it within him, delicate and floating like glitter, brightly glowing sparks that could be fanned into a steady flame, given enough care and attention. No wildfire, true. No desperate, hungry flame, raging beyond all control and sense, reducing everything it touches to a fine grey ash - but a warm blaze, a comforting glow, giving out light as well as heat. The kind of fire you could build a home around, a family. A life. 

He was lucky meeting her at the bar that night. Gina is whip smart, and funny as hell, and she fucks like she just escaped a nunnery, white cotton underwear still hanging from one slender ankle. She’s a project manager at a construction firm, used to handling herself around the roughest kind of men, and he’s got enough self-awareness to know that’s part of it too - that her ‘take no shit’ attitude, her willingness to call a spade a spade, is the perfect antidote to his own introspective nature, his tendency towards self-pity. There’s nothing that Gina can’t do, if she sets her mind to it. Given enough time, she could even win over Octavia. 

Yes, she’s exactly the kind of woman he could fall in love with. The kind of woman he _should_ fall in love with. And it would be so easy too, especially when he touches her like _this_ , and she moans like _that_ , all breathy and high-pitched, so that he could almost pretend - 

His mobile rings then, and he lifts his head, startled. Octavia got hold of it last week, working her annoying-little-sister magic, and now his ringtone is some earsplitting electronic remix that sounds like a truck colliding with a mariachi band. A real mood killer, second only to O herself. 

“Ignore it,” Gina moans, locking her ankles at the small of his back. She pulls his head back down to her neck, and he grins at her eagerness before pursing his lips, blowing cool air over her damp skin and making her shiver. Sneaky hands reach down between their bodies, and suddenly it’s his turn to groan as she rakes her nails over his erection through the thick denim barrier of his jeans. The ringing stops, but he barely notices, thoroughly distracted by the roaring of his blood in his ears. 

She’s just easing the zipper down on his jeans, her mouth working along the line of his lax jaw, when his phone rings again. 

This time he remembers Clarke, and freezes, his body going still against Gina. She mills her hips against him, nibbling at his ear lobe, before sighing and falling back against the mattress. The groan she lets out now has nothing to do with desire, and everything to do with frustration, pressing the heel of her hand against her forehead. 

“Bellamy,” she warns, but it’s no good. Already he’s pulling himself up, away from her, swinging his feet to the floor and reaching for his phone on the bedside table. It stops ringing just as he picks it up, the screen lighting up to show two missed call notifications, a string of messages from Clarke.

The last message reads simply <<i need you>>

He doesn’t even bother reading the rest before he replies.

<<Be there in ten>>

“Gina,” he says heavily, and pauses. If he was hoping that she would rush to reassure him, to cushion for them both the blow that he is about to land, he is left disappointed. It is into tense silence that he is forced to continue, “I have to go.”

“It’s her, isn’t it?” she says, and there’s something sharp and thin in her voice, a quavering note like the edge of a newly whetted blade. “That girl.”

“Clarke,” he corrects her as he leans down to grab his socks, turning them right side out before pulling them on. There’s a hole in the left one, and his big toe sticks out through the black cotton before he tugs the material into place. 

“Bellamy…” 

“She needs me,” he says, standing up and finally turning to face her. He towers over her like this, standing next to the bed with his hands on his hips, and Gina’s hazel eyes are dull as she looks up at him, no longer sparkling. He feels, briefly, a pang of regret. Not at leaving her, but that he feels nothing leaving her. Anything that he might have felt - looking at her now, curled and vulnerable on the bed, her hair still tousled from his hands, trembling lip still swollen from his mouth - pales against his urgent need to go to Clarke, the impatience that cruelly clips his words. “I need to go and get her.”

“She doesn’t _need_ you,” Gina says, sitting up and pulling down her jumper where it’s rucked up against her ribs. “You’re not her brother, Bellamy. You’re not responsible for her.”

He doesn’t dignify that with an answer, though he can’t help the bitter twist of his mouth at her words. She sighs again, shuffling across the bed to stand up.

“So much for a romantic Christmas Eve,” she mutters under her breath, and he hates himself for pretending not to hear her. 

He’s crossed the bedroom, hand already on the doorknob, before he remembers. Gina looks up as he turns around, pausing where she’s putting on her shoe, and he almost closes his eyes at the relief he sees in her expression, the flickering weight of her hope pressing desperately against him. 

“Can you - ” Bellamy stops, and swallows. “Can you stay here while I go get her? Watch Octavia for me?”

“You’re joking,” she says flatly. She jams the shoe roughly onto her foot and stands to face him, crossing her arms over her chest. “Tell me, right now, that you’re joking.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” he says, wincing at how pathetic he sounds. Gina scoffs in disbelief, looking away from him. “She’s asleep. Just - stay here, please, until I get back. I don’t want to leave her on her own.”

It’s not that he doesn’t know this will have consequences. This is not the first time that Bellamy has been faced with this choice - the choice between a girlfriend or his girls, between the height of his pleasure and the weight of his responsibility, between a normal, easy life and the sharp tug of that red string tied somewhere inside his ribcage. Not the first time that he has left a date, or a still-warm bed, confronted with tears or anger or simple disbelief from his jilted partner. 

Relationships, he has learned, are their own special kind of shared delusion, two otherwise sane people choosing to believe that they are the only two people in the world, or at least the only two people that matter. _I will always choose you_ \- repeated again and again like a holy vow, so many pretty words overlaid like strands of fine silk to form a delicate, shimmering web, woven together to create an entirely new reality, as flimsy and weak as all lies inevitably turn out to be. And once that spell is broken - once the illusion starts to fray, once _I will always choose you_ eventually becomes _I will choose you sometimes, I will choose you when it is easy, I will choose you in these circumstances, but not these others_ \- it never quite recovers, not really. 

Bellamy knows all this. He just doesn’t care. 

Gina nods, once, and he leaves. 

\- - 

Bellamy can count on one hand the number of times he’s actually been inside the Griffin house. It’s not just because he and Abby don’t get on - although that’s part of it, their mutual dislike by now well-established, a decade of petty slights and insults piling between them like slow-moving sediment gradually hardening into slate, brittle and sharp-edged. There is something about the house that makes him deeply uneasy. Something about the blank white walls, the rows of gleaming and unused appliances, every piece of furniture set at perfect right angles to the next, that sends shivers running down his spine, the hairs on the back of his neck rising like someone just walked over his grave. Ghosts, thin whispering echoes, not from the past but from another world, some alternate reality in which Clarke never met him or Octavia, where she was left here to rot with her distant mother and all the love that money could ( _couldn’t_ ) buy. All the more terrifying, for how easily it almost happened. 

To his shameful relief, the slow exhale of his breath as his hands loosen their tense grip on the wheel, it doesn’t look like he’ll be going inside tonight either. He spots Clarke before he even pulls up, car headlights illuminating her slight figure as she sits on the sidewalk outside the house, shoulders slumped and gaze downcast. She is a pitiful sight, outside alone in the dark, the house behind her lit up and tastefully decorated in strings of white and gold lights. 

Clarke’s not wearing a coat, Bellamy notes with irritation, worried eyes catching on the pale flash of her bare skin in the darkness, slender arms wrapped around herself for warmth. She shivers while he watches, and he swears viciously as he pulls up to the kerb, wrenching the handbrake up with a sharp jerk of his hand, the plastic whining and creaking in protest. Stepping out of the car, he looks up at the house and swears again, this time under his breath, wondering if Abby has even noticed the absence of her daughter.

“Hey,” he calls out, attempting cheerfulness. It’s cold tonight, a sharp wind carrying the promise of late December frost, and his breath turns to white smoke in the frigid air. “Someone order a taxi?”

Clarke stands up as he approaches, wobbling slightly on low heels, and gives him a weak smile in return. The dress she’s wearing is one he’s not seen before; dark red velvet with a white lace collar, drawing tight around her tiny waist and flaring out over the soft curves of her growing hips, ending just above her knees. Her blonde hair is curled and loose around her shoulders, no jewellery aside from the glint of tiny gold hoops in her ears.

She looks - _like every wet dream he’s ever had_ \- beautiful. Teardrops glitter like diamonds where they’re caught in her lashes, her eyes still red from crying, and her skin is pale from the cold, two spots of bright colour high on her cheekbones, one at the end of her nose. _His sweet spun-sugar girl._ Kissing her now, Bellamy thinks, would be like biting into a coconut shaved ice, cold and sweet and sharp, a lingering hint of sugar left on the tongue. 

“You okay?” he asks.

A few years ago, a few months ago even, Clarke would have broken down in tears as soon as he stepped out of the car, rushing into his arms for the comfort that she trusted only him to provide. But she is not a child anymore, for all she is not quite a woman yet either, and so she just shrugs miserably, her eyes dropping to her feet. 

He pulls off his jacket and drapes it around her shoulders. If he’d been thinking properly he would have brought one of Octavia’s jackets for her to wear. Or perhaps not - he likes the way she looks in his clothes.

She accepts the jacket, threading her arms through the sleeves, but still refuses to look at him. 

“Can we just - go home?” she asks quietly. 

“Of course.”

\- -

They drive in silence, Bellamy sticking to the quieter back roads rather than cut through the city centre with its crowds of drunk Christmas Eve revellers, throngs of rowdy men spilling out onto the streets with no sense of self-preservation. He glances at Clarke as he drives, but she stays turned away from him, staring out of the dark passenger window with her chin propped on her hand. There’s a red velvet ribbon in her hair to match her dress, tied into a neat bow to hold back the front sections of her curls, and his fingers twitch on the gearstick, fighting the urge to reach out and touch it, to bury his hand in her soft hair, to pull her close against him. 

Instead he leans over to crank the heating all the way up, the dashboard rattling as hot air rushes through the vents. The car slowly heats up, air filling with the stale smell of burning dust, and Clarke’s shivering gradually stops, although the lines of her body remain tense, shoulders stiff in Bellamy’s leather jacket. Only her left hand moves, a tiny whirlwind of anxious energy, fingers nervously plucking at the fabric of her dress, picking at the already reddened skin around her thumbnail. 

Suddenly she inhales sharply, turning to him. “Did I ruin your night?” she asks, eyes wide and wet. “Wasn’t Gina coming over tonight?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, shaking his head, and she frowns, clearly not believing him. They reach a set of train tracks just as the barrier drops, lights flashing to signal an approaching train, and he pulls the car to a smooth stop, reaches over to put a reassuring hand on her knee. Clarke’s flesh is chilled, soft skin goosepimpling under his palm, and he squeezes lightly, swallowing down a groan at the feel of her slender thigh in his hand, how easily he encircles her. “You could never ruin anything.”

Bellamy leaves his hand there while they wait. The car is quiet, aside from the wheeze of the struggling heater, and though he is careful to keep his gaze fixed straight ahead he swears that he hears Clarke’s breathing catch and quicken, a flicker of movement in his peripheral vision as her hand clenches into a fist on the seat. Slowly, heart pounding in his chest, he strokes across her thigh with his thumb. Deliberately casual, keeping his grip loose, his touch light, dancing across her frost-kissed skin like sun on snow. She must have missed a spot when she was shaving earlier, his touch alighting on a tiny patch of downy blonde hair just above her knee, and tenderly he traces its outline, a stolen intimacy that sets his blood aflame, makes his teeth ache. 

He widens his grip, hand spreading out across her thigh, the tip of his pinky finger touching the velvet hem of her dress. 

The crossing lights shine directly into the car, casting them both in vivid scarlet light, and he imagines trailing his hand up her leg. _Her muscles tensing beneath his palm, seat creaking as she squirms, chilled flesh slowly giving way to the warmer skin between her thighs, the soft wet heart of her. Perhaps she would reach for him. Her little hand clasping around his arm, the delicate bite of her neatly trimmed nails digging into his wrist. Stop, yes, please wait, all the sweet and begging sounds of her gradual undoing. He would be gentle with her, he swears. Slow, careful, always so careful, with this girl, with his girl. He’d take his time, learn the shape of her cunt through the damp fabric of her panties, waiting until her thighs slowly unclenched around his hand, her hips rising to meet the movements of his fingers. Then - and only then - would he move the fabric aside, and she’d shudder, gasp as he pushed his fingers inside her._

_Is it his imagination, or does Clarke sigh, then?_

The train rushes through the intersection, a blinding roar of light and rushing steel, and Clarke jumps beneath his hand, all tension shattered. It’s gone as quickly as it arrived, and in its wake - her back turning to him once more, Bellamy’s hand left tingling as he reluctantly pulls it away. 

The barriers rise, an impatient driver behind them leaning on his horn, and Bellamy lifts his hand to give him the finger before he drives off. 

\- -

Bellamy eases the car into the driveway, loose gravel crunching under the tires. Gina must have been watching from the window, anticipating their arrival, because she steps out of the front door before he’s even cut the engine, still pulling on her coat in her rush to leave. Even at this distance he can see the barely restrained anger in her movements, the force with which she slams the door, sharp crack ringing through the night like a gunshot. Beside him Clarke makes a small sound of alarm, sitting up in her seat. 

He steps out of the car just as Gina descends the porch steps, lifting his hands in the universal sign for surrender. It’s a weak joke, barely raising a smile, and although she lets him take her into his arms, even lets him kiss her, her mouth is lax under his, her body stiff and unresponsible in his hold. 

“Thanks,” he whispers to her, letting his lips brush gently against her ear, using every weapon in his dwindling arsenal. The tension in his chest eases slightly as she shivers, body swaying unwillingly into his for a moment, and then he steps back, hearing footsteps behind him. He feels the weight of Clarke’s stare on them as he continues, “I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

Gina nods, a smile flickering briefly across her face, but the redness around her eyes is obvious even in the low light, the skin turned puffy and tender. 

“Call me,” she says tersely, stepping past him, and without thinking he steps back too, placing himself protectively between her and Clarke, his arm coming up like a barrier. Gina’s gaze snaps to his, eyes widening in surprise, and mentally he kicks himself, clearing his throat awkwardly. 

“Speak to you tomorrow.”

He nudges Clarke towards the house, hand at the small of her back as she navigates over the gravel in her heels, perhaps pushing her a little faster than she might otherwise have moved. He follows her up the porch steps, glancing back to see Gina stood by her car in the street, watching them, brow furrowed. The look on her face is not one he can easily describe - confusion perhaps, the slow-dawning and unwelcome realisation of something not previously considered - but it is one he recognises.

He saw the same look on his mother’s face, when she decided to leave. 

Clarke kicks off her heels in the hallway, two neat thuds as they hit the baseboard, and looks up at him with miserable blue eyes. She’s even smaller in bare feet, the top of her head just reaching the middle of his chest, and it’s the work of an instant to see her as a child again, to _blink_ and remember the tiny four year-old he first met all those years ago, clutching tight to his sister’s hand like a lifeline. 

“My mom’s gonna be mad at me,” she says, wretched. Her lower lip quivers, soft and pouting, and he thinks about kissing her, tendering that petal-pink flesh between his teeth until it’s swollen and blushing red. “I didn’t tell her that I was leaving the party. She’ll be worried.”

“Go get changed,” Bellamy says. Abby could do with being a little more worried about her daughter, in his opinion. He helps Clarke out of his jacket and hangs it on the coatstand, resisting the urge to lift it to his face and inhale. “Put on something warm, and I’ll make you some hot chocolate, okay?”

The tentative smile that Clarke gives him then more than makes up for Gina’s anger.

In the kitchen he heats milk in a pan on the stovetop, humming to himself as he whisks in cocoa powder and sugar, brings it to a gentle simmer. A strange nervous energy thrums through him, as though he’d stuck his fingers in a live socket, and he downs a glass of water while he watches the pan, drumming his fingers against the counter, willing himself to calm down. 

Too late he realises that he didn’t ask Clarke where she wanted her cocoa, not sure whether he should take it to her in bed - but he is delivered from his confusion by the sound of her bedroom door opening, the faraway creak of the hallway floorboards as she moves through the house. 

He turns off the stove just as the pan threatens to boil over, dividing the piping hot cocoa between two mugs. The marshmallows he leaves in the cabinet. Octavia likes her cocoa sweet enough to hurt her teeth, so many marshmallows that it turns into a soggy mess, but his girl takes hers plain, with just a sprinkle of cinnamon. 

_Our princess is sweet enough already, isn’t she?_ he likes to teases her, watching the blush rise in her cheeks, the way that she worries her lip with her teeth, hiding a pleased, secret smile. _You don’t need anything else, huh?_

“It’s ready,” he calls out, putting the cinnamon back in the cabinet. “Do you want to take it to bed, or do you want to hang out for a while?”

Clarke doesnt answer, and Bellamy sighs, picking up the mugs and walking through to the living room. 

“Hey, I was asking if - ”

He stops. 

The first thing he sees is Clarke’s pyjamas - if you could even call them that, a pair of leggings and one of his old t-shirts - and he doesn’t know what it says about him, that he finds her just as beautiful in his clothes as he did in her party dress. More so, even. 

The second thing he sees is the mistletoe that she’s standing under. 

It had been a gift from Gina, the mistletoe, though he cringes to remember it now. She’d brought it with her earlier, standing on tiptoe to tape it to the doorframe before dragging Bellamy under it for a kiss, ignoring Octavia as she loudly gagged from the couch. He’d thought then, looking up, that the tape would take part of the paintwork off with it when it came down. 

That all feels very far away now, though. 

Silently he puts the mugs down on the coffee table and walks towards Clarke. 

Bellamy should laugh. That is the appropriate, the only reasonable response to this scenario, the clichéd tableau laid out before him. A clumsy and obvious seduction, a teenage girl’s idea of romance, born from too many Hallmark movies and teen girl magazines, childish fantasies spoken into existence under pitched sleepover sheets. He shouldn’t feel this tightness in his chest, a dull pain like someone has reached in and wrapped their fist around his heart, pulse hammering wildly like a bird flapping its wings against the bars of a cage. He definitely shouldn’t be walking over to her like this, slow and deliberate, savouring the silence of her held breath, anticipation pooling like sweet syrup he is already imagining swallowing down. 

Clarke is forced to look up as he stops in front of her, the height difference between them obscene, her eyes meeting his for a fleeting second before she lifts her chin even higher, looking up to the mistletoe hanging above them. He puts his arms around her, something in him breaking apart at the exact moment that she relaxes into him, the two of them collapsing into one another, like every atom in each of their bodies is a bonded pair, straining to return home. 

_Maybe_ , he thinks. Maybe this is it, the moment that they’ve both been waiting for, have known was coming, have been dancing around for so long. He leans down, and she tightens her fingers in his shirt where she’s got her hands on his chest, and every part of him is singing, burning, crying out - 

And then he notices how she’s trembling, the way that her hands shake as she twists them in the thick cotton of his flannel, the hitch in her breath, a sound almost like crying. She’s scared, tight and tense and vibrating with it, as though he might touch her and watch her shatter to pieces, fall apart in his hands like so much broken glass. And that, he will not, _cannot_ , let happen. 

Clarke isn’t ready. Not ready for him, for the enormity of this thing between them, the reality of what he already knows this will turn out to be. Maybe there will be a time when his desire for her outweighs his love, his need to protect her - but that will be a very different version of himself, one that he hopes to never meet. 

Bellamy leans down and presses his lips to Clarke’s forehead, and she lets out a shaky breath that sounds entirely too much like relief. 

“Shh,” he says. Nonsensically, because neither of them are saying anything; still, he can’t stop himself from repeating it, over and over, low and murmuring like the quiet lullabies he used to sing to Octavia, the bedtime stories he used to read to the girls while they snuggled into his side, one tucked under each arm, like bookends. He draws Clarke more tightly into his arms, and she settles against his chest, her head tucked under his chin. Her blonde hair is soft when he runs his hand over it, silk beneath his palm, and she sighs as he pets her, comforted. Swiftly, acting on some impulse he doesn’t quite understand, and doesn’t want to examine too closely, he pulls the red ribbon from her hair and slips it into his pocket. 

And then, somehow, without realising it, they’re moving. Slow at first, gently rocking from side to side, one of his hands finding its way to her slim waist, the other still buried in her hair. Dancing, turning together on the worn living room carpet; a dance that neither of them had to learn to know, steps never taught but memorised nonetheless, a pattern traced out long ago and neatly followed, like two heavenly bodies beckoned on by gravity. He hums as they sway, as his fingers cradle the back of her head against his chest, and she giggles at the discordant notes, turning her head to hide the sound in his shirt. 

She follows his lead so beautifully, he thinks, and feels the heat inside him rise once more, wildfire flames licking at his veins. 

Suddenly he pushes her away, guides her into a spin, and she laughs, hair forming a shining golden arc as she twirls, the sweet vanilla scent of her filling the air. 

“Bed,” Bellamy says reluctantly, watching Clarke’s face fall, careful to keep his own expression neutral. He kisses her on the forehead again, briefly this time; a neat full stop to punctuate the end of their time together. “You can take your cocoa with you to bed.”

He averts his gaze as she collects her mug, knowing exactly what she’ll see if she looks into his eyes. Knowing, that if she is to go to bed alone, she must not see it. 

\- -

Bellamy stands in the living room long after Clarke is gone. Listening, at first; to the soft pad of her footsteps across the floor, the quiet flush of the toilet, the soft click of the bedroom door. He imagines, perhaps, the hesitation in her steps, the heartbeat pause before she goes into the bedroom, her hand on the doorknob. He knows that he imagines the blush in her cheeks, the way that she turns away from Octavia in bed, curled into herself like a secret - for he has imagined those things before, and many others. All the frayed strands of his guilt twist together in his chest, weaving themselves into a rope that is more than long enough to hang himself with. 

He takes the ribbon from his pocket. The soft velvet is a poor substitute for her skin, but he finds himself running a thumb over it nonetheless, bringing it to his nose, to inhale the scent of her that lingers. 

**Author's Note:**

> New instalment coming soon!


End file.
